Western ambassadors to skip Nagasaki memorial after Israel snub

TOKYO: Ambassadors from Western countries including the United States will skip a ceremony marking the 79th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki after Israel was snubbed, officials said Wednesday.

Nagasaki’s mayor last week said that Israel’s ambassador Gilad Cohen was not invited to Friday’s event in the southern Japanese city because of the risk of possible protests over the Gaza conflict.

The US and British embassies said on Tuesday that their ambassadors would not take part as a result, and that their countries would be represented by lower-ranking diplomats.

Media reports said that Australia, Italy, Canada and the European Union, who together with the US, Britain and Germany signed a strongly worded joint letter to Nagasaki’s mayor last month, would follow suit.

US ambassador Rahm Emanuel will not attend “after the mayor of Nagasaki politicised the event by not inviting the Israeli ambassador”, an embassy spokesperson told AFP.

Instead Emanuel, who was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, will go to a separate event at a temple in Tokyo, the spokesperson said.

The British embassy said that ambassador Julia Longbottom would also not be in Nagasaki, saying that not inviting Israel “creates an unfortunate and misleading equivalency with Russia and Belarus — the only other countries not invited to this year’s ceremony.”

A spokesperson for the French embassy said that its number two would attend, telling AFP that the “decision not to invite the representative of Israel is regrettable and questionable”.

Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki had said last week that the decision not to invite Cohen was “not politically motivated” but based on a desire to “hold the ceremony in a peaceful and sombre atmosphere”.

In June Suzuki said Nagasaki had sent a letter to the Israeli embassy calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

In their letter to Suzuki, the six Western envoys had warned that if Israel was excluded “it would become difficult for us to have high-level participation at this event.”

Government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi on Wednesday declined to comment, saying invitations were “a decision for the organiser, Nagasaki City.”

A Nagasaki official in charge of the ceremony said it was “obviously better to have high-level individuals, like ambassadors themselves, taking part”.

“What is important is that representatives of the countries will attend the ceremony,” he told AFP.